Published 4:00 am, Friday, August 17, 2001

If 16-year-old Andrew Smith of Oakland called his parents crazy, they shouldn't be insulted. They should consider it a compliment.

In today's teen talk, crazy means cool, and it is one of Smith's most frequently used slang words, as he proved recently as he and his friends checked out video games at Funcoland in Emeryville.

And when he says "tight," he's not referring to his back-to-school clothes. The word describes a situation or a product that is exceptionally good or appealing - what many parents would have likely called "groovy" during their adolescence.

But Smith says he and his parents don't have to worry much about the communication gap.

"I live with my grandma, and she pretty much understands everything I say with slang, because I've been talking like that since I could talk," said the Oakland Tech High School sophomore. "When I'm with my parents, I don't use too much slang. I think it's kind of disrespectful to use slang if they don't understand what you're saying."

Parents taking their kids back to school in the upcoming weeks who feel like they've entered a foreign country need only look back. As in groovy. Right on. Far out. How about peachy-keen?

Just like every generation, kids today are using language to form their identities, said Tom Dalzell, a Berkeley lawyer and slang expert who has written two books on slang, "Flappers 2 Rappers" (Merriam-Webster, 1996) and "The Slang of Sin" (Merriam-Webster, 1998).

He said most experimentation with language occurs during the junior high and high school years.

"There's a lot more socializing in those years," he said. "There's feelings of rebellion. You're creating identities during adolescence, and you feel part of a language that bonds you. You feel alienated, and it bonds you with others who feel alienated. Slang has a way of marking you - 'I'm a young person.' "

The language seems as fickle as it is steadfast: Cities may have slightly different slang words - especially for things like drugs - but, for the most part, most popular slang is the same.

So the good news is that even if parents and kids don't speak the same language, kids from the East Bay should have no trouble understanding their counterparts in, say, San Rafael. "Chillin' " means relaxing, "sick" is a difficult skateboard trick and "twomps" is a $20 bag of marijuana anywhere in the Bay Area.

"You just kind of pick it up," said Nik Mihalko, a sophomore at Terra Linda High School in San Rafael. "You get it from people you meet. It doesn't go through your mind like, 'I met this person, I'm gonna pick up this word.' But if you meet people, you might just start talking like them."

Antioch dental assistant Kay Wall, 47, said that although her son, Matt, 22,

used a great deal of slang when he was a teenager, she was always able to communicate clearly with him, even when he seemed to be talking like one of his rap albums.

"I never hesitated to ask him," she said. "I tried to keep up, but I didn't use it - that would embarrass him. I tried to know the words and understand how they're used, just to know what they're talking about."

Wall's 15-year-old nephew, Craig Frazier, who was visiting from Portland, Ore., had a bit of advice for parents struggling to understand their children: "Parents should always listen to their kids and what they have to say. Some parents don't listen - they just turn their backs, and their kids can say whatever they want. It makes me mad. They could learn a lot."

Wall said her son eventually phased out most of his slang words.

"He talks much clearer ever since he got away from rap music. He got into the blues," she said. "He has much more variety now. His English got better, he learned to speak better, learned how to talk better. So it does change."

The sources of slang words vary: some may have carried over from years or decades past, while others may have been introduced by new movies or music videos, and still others may have been invented by a particular group, and may last only a short time.

A few months ago, for example, some San Rafael teen athletes coined a term "ink," which meant to party. The word was popular for a few weeks and disappeared.

"As a species, we are almost hard-wired to play with language," said Dalzell.

For example, Dalzell said, the word "tight" has come full circle since its appearance about 50 years ago.

Dalzell said jazz musicians in the 1950s and early 1960s used the word "uptight" to describe something that was very good; then, in the mid- to late- 1960s, hippies used "uptight" to describe someone who was inhibited or overly cautious; now, the shortened version means exactly the opposite.

"It's almost like these words are notional, or have lives of their own - they sit around plotting how they will come back," Dalzell said. "Of course, that doesn't happen, but it happens."

Dalzell said most slang words have roots in African American culture.

"It serves two functions," he said. "It bonds the people who are oppressed, and it functions as a gesture of resistance. You think about slang in America since 1935. To a large degree, larger than most people realize, slang has developed from African American slang - the most oppressed group in America.

"If you also look at gays, look at prisoners, look at boarding-school students, look at enlisted men in the Army, there are different levels of oppression, to be sure, but there is great slang."

Another slang term that has come full circle is "hip hop.

According the Dalzell, "hip hop" originated in the early 1900s from African Americans' use of "hip." In the '40s, the word became "hipster" to describe those in the jazz scene. In the '50s, "hippie" again described someone in the jazz scene, then in the 1960s the flower children. Now "hip hop" signifies the rap music scene.

"That's every generation sort of coming along and making their own mark on the language," Dalzell said. "So, you see, it is almost imperative to play with the language, and that is happening an awful lot when people are moving through junior high school and high school."

With the help of students from his Communication Arts and Sciences class, Ayers produced the 200-word Berkeley High Slang Dictionary, which provides definitions for words such as "schmabbin' " (driving fast, or driving around with a group of friends) and "gaffle" (to steal).

Four-hundred copies of the book have been sold, and many more have been given away.

Ayers noted that two topics in particular - marijuana and friendship - each generated a large amount of slang. The dictionary lists more than 20 words for each.

Ayers added that teens sometimes make up words simply because they rhyme with existing slang words.

For example, "off the hook," used to describe a good situation, became seriously outdated and was replaced with a modified, "off the heazy." For further emphasis, some teens modified the phrase, adding "fo' sheazy," (for sure) to the end of it - "off the heazy, fo' sheazy."

"I think (slang) is an essential part of their identity," Ayers said. "They are inventing their identity. They decide one year to the next - I want to be a Goth, I want to be into hip hop - and all this language stuff is playing with that. It's such an important time in their lives, there are a lot of changes, and that's where slang comes in."

But there is a trend that Ayers said he finds disturbing: Some teens are using the word "gay" to describe something they think is "stupid," and "ghetto" - which Ayers said is a coded word that negatively refers to African Americans - to describe something that is run-down or trashed.

There are other examples that refer to women and minorities.

Ayers said when he hears such uses he tries to educate his students about the importance of using slang without offending anyone.

So, what are parents to do if they want to understand their kids today?

Dalzell's suggestion: "Take the language seriously, and ask your kids what it means. Because by the time you get it written down, it's dead, almost by definition."

But Oakland video gamer Smith has some less-than-encouraging advice: "Don't try. Either don't try to be like your kids, or tell your kids to speak regular English around you, and everything will be all right, because they'll never catch up to us."

Brush up on all that

An online Teen Slang Dictionary sponsored by About the Human Internet contains terms that can bring your vocabulary from the Dark Ages of being "cool" to today's being "all that." Here are a few of entries:

-- All that and then some: in possession of all good qualities

-- Butter: something that is good

-- Five-O: police officer

-- Fly: cool

-- Hook up: be with a person romantically

-- Phat: fine, cool

-- Phat-free: not cool

-- Rents: parents

-- Spun: cool

-- Wingnut: not all there

-- Word up!: Exactly! The complete online teen slang dictionary can be found at parentingteens. about.com/bldictionary.htm.